It is well known to broadcast or multicast information to multiple users in a computer related system. For example, during a business presentation a number of the audience may follow the speaker's slides at remote locations on individual computers. When the speaker changes slides all the audience that are at remote locations must try to follow the changes and carry them out themselves. This is particularly the case if the speaker changes the order in which the slides are presented often causes frustration to the audience.
In another example, a server operator may wish to test, update or otherwise poll remote computers connected to it. This may be to carry out tests, software updates or whatever. This is a time-consuming exercise if done on a one by one basis. This is particularly the case in respect of an operator working on a screen which is open in the remote computers and sending commands to the remote computers. There is no current means of doing this without broadcasting the whole of the screen on both the server and the remote computer in order that commands, such as mouse click etc. can be accurately identified. This generally means that the whole screen content including the commands moves from the server to the remote computer or vice versa. This requires a significant amount of bandwidth between the server and the remote computer for perhaps just a very simple test.
There are products, such as Windows Remote Desktop Connection and virtual network computing (VNC) which allow a user to remotely access the system in order to see the system screen on multiple systems. These systems have the same disadvantages as identified above, i.e. transmission of the whole screen content is required to effect the necessary control function.
US 2006/0282855 (assignee: Digital Display Innovations, LLC.) discloses a multiple remote display system which includes a host system that supports both graphic and video-based frames. For each display and for each frame, a multi-display processor manages the necessary aspects of the remote display frames. The necessary portions are further processed, encoded and when necessary transmitted over a network to the remote display of each user. In certain embodiments the host system manages a remote desktop protocol and can transmit encoded video or frames at the same time. This is a complicated system and method which requires a high level of bandwidth as the remote displays receive the whole frame or video along with the remote desktop protocol signal.
One object of the present invention is to provide a method or system which solves at least some of the problems associated with the prior art.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a method, apparatus, and computer program embodied in non-transitory machine readable medium for controlling multiple systems on which the same operation is repeated for different remote computers or end-users, without broadcasting the host screen content.